1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information reproducing apparatus for reproducing digital information such as video, voice, etc., as well as an information recording/reproducing apparatus for the same. More particularly, the present invention relates to an apparatus for limiting recording of reproduced information onto other media on authorities given by the copyright holders, etc.
2. Description of Related Art
Now that digital TV broadcasting is started, various private-use digital recording/reproducing apparatuses have been put on the market in such package media fields as movie software, etc. so as to cope with such digital broadcasting contents. In the near future, package software to be used for those apparatuses are also expected to appear on the market. The most attractive advantage of such digital broadcasting and digital recording apparatuses is that no or almost no quality degradation is recognized in the respective processes of sending/recording/reproducing. And accordingly, a serious problem comes to arise from such the advantage of those digital apparatuses; a lot of illegal copies are generated from the high quality digital information of originals with use of those apparatuses and sold where the copyright holders do not know, so that no profit is returned to the copyright holders.
In order to solve the problem, U.S. Pat. No. 5,896,454 discloses a method for adding 2-bit copy control information to every information item. According to this method, the operation of a recording apparatus is controlled so that any one of the three choices “Copy Never”, “Copy Free”, and “one generation of copies is permitted” is selected. The recording apparatus does not work when “Copy Never” is set and starts recording when “Copy Free” is set.
If “Copy Never” is set for the copy control information when in broadcasting, a problem might arise; for example, when the user has a visitor while watching broadcast contents, the user might miss the contents and have no means for watching them later. The official gazette of JP-A149417/2000 discloses a method for solving this problem by means of “Temporary Recording” even when “Copy Never” is set for the copy control information. This is a method for recording physically the desired information on a recording medium once, then the user is enabled to watch the reproduced information for a predetermined period, for example, for just 90 minutes and the information is erased after that. This limit time is called as “retention period”. In other words, the method disables the information to be stored for a long time and used in other ways; it just enables the broadcast content to be watched only for 90 minutes, which is equivalent to the price. This method can solve the above-described inconvenience of the user, since the recorded information is not stored for a long time, so that the copyright holder's profit can be protected. The “Temporary Recording” is often set in a hard disk recorder built in the receiver due to the characteristics.